Blaudschun--Catholic Schools Met in NYC...

[upstater]

The possibility exists for UConn fans to be demoted to UMass fans. We'll still have our memories though. I have tapes from the past and I'll just keep replaying them changing the dates.

Boise State has a sugar daddy. Does UConn have a sugar daddy? I think basketball will be just fine under Ollie. But can they do what Houston did last year?

 

[huskyharry]

Uggghhh!
Another reason for Coach Ollie to get a long term deal...may be really difficult to attract another coach of anywhere near his abilities given the quagmire that UConn's athletic future is sinking into

 

[Vuce]

If and when this happens and we are on an increasingly isolated island, we have to hear from Warde and Susan at some point. Even if they just confirm what we know: "Uconn fans, we are really ."

Maybe we can be in a conference with Cincy and USF and play them each 6 times. And in hoops we will play them each 14 times.

 

[Dry Tortugas]

"Maybe if they had invited Penn State and then having the foresight to invite both FSU and Miami?

Hard to say."

If you're going to time travel, Gavitt should probably have never invited Syracuse or BC in the first place. They were the ones that demanded football schools be added almost immediately. Maybe we'd still be rolling along as a good hoop conference.

 

[tzznandrew]

The possibility exists for UConn fans to be demoted to UMass fans. We'll still have our memories though. I have tapes from the past and I'll just keep replaying them changing the dates.

When UMass fans start reminiscing about one title, let alone three, then we'll talk about falling to their level.

 

[ctchamps]

When UMass fans start reminiscing about one title, let alone three, then we'll talk about falling to their level.

And the Lebanese still have the Phoenicians on their mantels.

The termination of the BE will be a punch in the gut for me. Or if the BE survives and UConn goes elsewhere it will still be a punch in the gut. But the accomplishments of the basketball program will always be there for me. So events are bittersweet.

So UMass is a bad example. We'll end up being like Johnnies fans.

 

[tzznandrew]

And the Lebanese still have the Phoenicians on their mantels.

The termination of the BE will be a punch in the gut for me. Or if the BE survives and UConn goes elsewhere it will still be a punch in the gut. But the accomplishments of the basketball program will always be there for me. So events are bittersweet.

So UMass is a bad example. We'll end up being like Johnnies fans.

Johnnies' are just as bad.

Look, here are the schools, over the whole history of the NCAA, that have as many or more titles as UConn:

UCLA
Kentucky
Indiana
North Carolina
Duke
Kansas

That's a short list. There are times in history where some of them have been in the wilderness. And if you want to add other schools that have experienced that, with only, say, two titles, add Louisville and Cincy and Michigan State. It's hard to kill those programs off. There are a couple (San Francisco, OSU) that have never fully revived, but even in those scenarios, they won back to back titles, not over the course of 12 years.

The program is resilient, and will get picked up. It would be disastrous if they got stuck in this clusterfuck? Sure. But there's a lot left to play, and they've accomplished enough to eventually get a seat at the big boy table.

 

[JSB60]

I wish UCONN had never become a "football" school and could go with the Catholic league. I admit, I've lost all interest in "bowl subdivision" football because it's ruined basketball. That said, in the long run there will probably be five 16 team superconferences and UCONN will eventually make it into the top 80.

 

[upstater]

I wish UCONN had never become a "football" school and could go with the Catholic league. I admit, I've lost all interest in "bowl subdivision" football because it's ruined basketball. That said, in the long run there will probably be five 16 team superconferences and UCONN will eventually make it into the top 80.

Those Catholic schools are not going to do well. Why would you wish that on UConn?

 

[JSB60]

They'll do just fine as a basketball conference. The Big East had no football in the 80s and had a reasonable amount of success. How many good basketball recruits are actually choosing a school based on the football program, maybe a few, but certainly not so many that an 8-12 school basketball conference will be all that restricted in its talent level.

 

[upstater]

They'll do just fine as a basketball conference. The Big East had no football in the 80s and had a reasonable amount of success. How many good basketball recruits are actually choosing a school based on the football program, maybe a few, but certainly not so many that an 8-12 school basketball conference will be all that restricted in its talent level.

The 80s were a long time ago. Yale football was once ranked in the top 20 during the 1980s.

Basketball-wise, the Catholics went into a deep funk afterward. I just pointed out in another thread that the best of these schools, G'town, made the Final 8 just once over an 18 year period following the 1980s. And why did they come back from the abyss starting around the early to mid 2000s?

UConn held the fort during that period, and these schools started to benefit from UConn's championships, but when Syracuse won a championship and Pitt started playing better, followed by the addition of Louisville, and the fall of the ACC, that's when the talent started flowing back to the Catholic schools.

I expect them to fade if they break off. Fade into oblivion? No. But I don't expect them to occupy my thoughts any more than Xavier does.

 

[freescooter]

The 80s were a long time ago. Yale football was once ranked in the top 20 during the 1980s.

Basketball-wise, the Catholics went into a deep funk afterward. I just pointed out in another thread that the best of these schools, G'town, made the Final 8 just once over an 18 year period following the 1980s. And why did they come back from the abyss starting around the early to mid 2000s?

UConn held the fort during that period, and these schools started to benefit from UConn's championships, but when Syracuse won a championship and Pitt started playing better, followed by the addition of Louisville, and the fall of the ACC, that's when the talent started flowing back to the Catholic schools.

I expect them to fade if they break off. Fade into oblivion? No. But I don't expect them to occupy my thoughts any more than Xavier does.

upstater, for once we agree! They break away and their future is the A-10. Nice basketball league but mostly an afterthought. And $350-400,000 a year compared to $1million plus.

 

[FriarJ]

Every single one of the schools faded away because their facilities could not come close to the facilities at the bigger schools at the time and that hurt recruiting. The majority of them have now fought back with millions and millions of dollars pumped into their facilities.

This breakup could not come at a better time, they now have the facilities, in most cases they have dynamic young coaches and the ability to sell a true basketball league to bigtime recruits with top notch facilities and great coaches is a big positive.

I actually like the BB7's chances if they pull this off, especially if they retain the name.

 

[EdgewoodNHV]

I wish UCONN had never become a "football" school and could go with the Catholic league. I admit, I've lost all interest in "bowl subdivision" football because it's ruined basketball. That said, in the long run there will probably be five 16 team superconferences and UCONN will eventually make it into the top 80.

Couldn't disagree more. Love UConn basketball, but I wouldn't give up my enjoyment of the entire UConn football experience to put ourselves in the "envious" position of Georgetown or Seton Hall.

 

[huskyharry]

I wish UCONN had never become a "football" school and could go with the Catholic league. I admit, I've lost all interest in "bowl subdivision" football because it's ruined basketball. That said, in the long run there will probably be five 16 team superconferences and UCONN will eventually make it into the top 80.

UConn football is viewed by the college football elite as a Johnny come lately. Coach Edsall led them to a small amount of success, which may never be replicated. The pinnacle of success was being selected for a BCS bowl where they were thrashed by Oklahoma and by most reports actually lost a large sum of $ because their wasn't adequate fan support to buy the required # of tickets. If what most posters here think is the optimum outcome occurs, UConn will land in a new mega ACC or Big Ten. For football this will mean being a perpetual doormat. Sure there will be additional guaranteed cash for the school, but I think the projections and estimates for this are overblown...just like UConn thought going to a BCS bowl would be a cash cow. Is it really an exciting prospect for the football team to perpetually finish in the bottom third of a league and get beaten by 30 points by the top teams?

 

[ffg53]

UConn football is viewed by the college football elite as a Johnny come lately. Coach Edsall led them to a small amount of success, which may never be replicated. The pinnacle of success was being selected for a BCS bowl where they were thrashed by Oklahoma and by most reports actually lost a large sum of $ because their wasn't adequate fan support to buy the required # of tickets. If what most posters here think is the optimum outcome occurs, UConn will land in a new mega ACC or Big Ten. For football this will mean being a perpetual doormat. Sure there will be additional guaranteed cash for the school, but I think the projections and estimates for this are overblown...just like UConn thought going to a BCS bowl would be a cash cow. Is it really an exciting prospect for the football team to perpetually finish in the bottom third of a league and get beaten by 30 points by the top teams?

I wonder how many people said the same thing about UConn basketball when we joined the Big East?

 

[freescooter]

UConn football is viewed by the college football elite as a Johnny come lately. Coach Edsall led them to a small amount of success, which may never be replicated. The pinnacle of success was being selected for a BCS bowl where they were thrashed by Oklahoma and by most reports actually lost a large sum of $ because their wasn't adequate fan support to buy the required # of tickets. If what most posters here think is the optimum outcome occurs, UConn will land in a new mega ACC or Big Ten. For football this will mean being a perpetual doormat. Sure there will be additional guaranteed cash for the school, but I think the projections and estimates for this are overblown...just like UConn thought going to a BCS bowl would be a cash cow. Is it really an exciting prospect for the football team to perpetually finish in the bottom third of a league and get beaten by 30 points by the top teams?

Aside from some inaccuracies in your post about what UConn did or did not expect, I guess I have two responses...
1. Why would you assume we'd perpetually finish in the bottom third of either the Big 10 or certainly the ACC? Certainly not based on the evidence.

2. Even were your assumptions to come to pass, how would we be worse off than Georgetown, Villanova et al who are going to be relegated to an A-10 level conference if they split from football?

 

[upstater]

UConn football is viewed by the college football elite as a Johnny come lately. Coach Edsall led them to a small amount of success, which may never be replicated. The pinnacle of success was being selected for a BCS bowl where they were thrashed by Oklahoma and by most reports actually lost a large sum of $ because their wasn't adequate fan support to buy the required # of tickets. If what most posters here think is the optimum outcome occurs, UConn will land in a new mega ACC or Big Ten. For football this will mean being a perpetual doormat. Sure there will be additional guaranteed cash for the school, but I think the projections and estimates for this are overblown...just like UConn thought going to a BCS bowl would be a cash cow. Is it really an exciting prospect for the football team to perpetually finish in the bottom third of a league and get beaten by 30 points by the top teams?

BigTen: $40 million a year
Big East: $2 million a year

 

[huskyharry]

Every single one of the schools faded away because their facilities could not come close to the facilities at the bigger schools at the time and that hurt recruiting. The majority of them have now fought back with millions and millions of dollars pumped into their facilities.

This breakup could not come at a better time, they now have the facilities, in most cases they have dynamic young coaches and the ability to sell a true basketball league to bigtime recruits with top notch facilities and great coaches is a big positive.

I actually like the BB7's chances if they pull this off, especially if they retain the name.

With the ground breaking due soon for the bball practice facilities, UConn has the facilities.
If they sign up Coach Ollie for the long term, they will have coaching stability.
I would much rather see UConn in a basketball conference with the Catholic 7 from the big East plus Philly's big five ...add Xavier and it would be a strong basketball conference with regional ties and reasonable travel expenses. Football could compete well in the MAC.
Better IMO than staying in a conference with teams spread over the full spectrum of the 48 states with no history or propensity to develop rivalries...e.g. Tulane, Boise, SDSU, UCF, USF, E. Carolina etc

 

[freescooter]

"Maybe if they had invited Penn State and then having the foresight to invite both FSU and Miami?

Hard to say."

If you're going to time travel, Gavitt should probably have never invited Syracuse or BC in the first place. They were the ones that demanded football schools be added almost immediately. Maybe we'd still be rolling along as a good hoop conference.

Or maybe if the football schools had left in 2003, BC would have stayed, could have added another couple of schools, the league could have gotten its own media deal and it would have been a serious competitor for the ACC. It would have been a basketball power on top of all that.

 

[Pudge]

We were never going to be a serious competitor to the ACC. That track just leads to this continuous downward spiral ... that HOPEFULLY leads to the ACC swirling down the toilet cause some other Big Entity is a predator.

 

[ctchamps]

Johnnies' are just as bad.

Look, here are the schools, over the whole history of the NCAA, that have as many or more titles as UConn:

UCLA
Kentucky
Indiana
North Carolina
Duke
Kansas

That's a short list. There are times in history where some of them have been in the wilderness. And if you want to add other schools that have experienced that, with only, say, two titles, add Louisville and Cincy and Michigan State. It's hard to kill those programs off. There are a couple (San Francisco, OSU) that have never fully revived, but even in those scenarios, they won back to back titles, not over the course of 12 years.

The program is resilient, and will get picked up. It would be disastrous if they got stuck in this cluster****? Sure. But there's a lot left to play, and they've accomplished enough to eventually get a seat at the big boy table.

I love your optimism. Personally I'm optimistic UConn will land on its feet and years from now we'll look at these few years as a bump in the road. My sadness is about the demise of the BE. Loved the BE tournament and the graphics showing UConn's accomplishments. The BE may not exist after this year. The accomplishments don't get taken away.

 

[freescooter]

We were never going to be a serious competitor to the ACC. That track just leads to this continuous downward spiral ... that HOPEFULLY leads to the ACC swirling down the toilet cause some other Big Entity is a predator.

You might be right, but I'm not certain of that, particularly given the demise of Miami in particular over the period. But further, I think that we'd have been no worse off, and likely better off today had we taken that step. We would have a "BCS" league still even if it was made up of the very same temas who will populated this latest version of the Big Easten. We would have added some teams after breaking away, and those teams would now be viewed as members of the club...who knows what the outcome might have been. We'd have been the dominant basketball league with solid football.

 

[HooperScooper]

I wonder how many people said the same thing about UConn basketball when we joined the Big East?

Funny, I was going to post the exact same thing.

Being successful with football in general (don't go pointing out anomalies because there obviously are some) has to do with spending a lot of money. The largest athletic budgest are typically the successful football schools.

Here are the athletic budgets for most of the schools in the big six conferences, http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2011/08/22/In-Depth/Budgets.aspx

In the ACC UConn's $64 million athletic budget would place it right up near the top while in the Big Ten it would be almost rock bottom only above Indiana and way behind OSU, Michigan and Penn St.

If UConn were to get a serious injection of money into the atheltics budget I'm certain they would be most competitive in college football.

 

[CTBasketball]

Funny, I was going to post the exact same thing.

Being successful with football in general (don't go pointing out anomalies because there obviously are some) has to do with spending a lot of money. The largest athletic budgest are typically the successful football schools.

Here are the athletic budgets for most of the schools in the big six conferences, http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2011/08/22/In-Depth/Budgets.aspx

In the ACC UConn's $64 million athletic budget would place it right up near the top while in the Big Ten it would be almost rock bottom only above Indiana and way behind OSU, Michigan and Penn St.

If UConn were to get a serious injection of money into the atheltics budget I'm certain they would be most competitive in college football.

There's a correlation. Just like studying for a test. The more you study, the better you do. The more money you put into a program, there is a great chance the program will see success on the field.

 

[FriarJ]

With the ground breaking due soon for the bball practice facilities, UConn has the facilities.
If they sign up Coach Ollie for the long term, they will have coaching stability.
I would much rather see UConn in a basketball conference with the Catholic 7 from the big East plus Philly's big five ...add Xavier and it would be a strong basketball conference with regional ties and reasonable travel expenses. Football could compete well in the MAC.
Better IMO than staying in a conference with teams spread over the full spectrum of the 48 states with no history or propensity to develop rivalries...e.g. Tulane, Boise, SDSU, UCF, USF, E. Carolina etc

I was never trying to imply UConn did not have the facilities, whatever they lacked they more than made up with a HOF coach. I was commenting on why the Catholics faded as football grew.

 

[ctchamps]

I was never trying to imply UConn did not have the facilities, whatever they lacked they more than made up with a HOF coach. I was commenting on why the Catholics faded as football grew.

I tip my hat off to you.

 

[freescooter]

I wonder how many people said the same thing about UConn basketball when we joined the Big East?

Actually nobody really did. In the early Big East years UConn was a middle of the road team. If the NCAA tourney had as many bids as it does now, UConn would likely have earned at least 1 or 2 more. Nobody really expected UConn to win National Championships but UConn wasn't terrible either. That came later. But to be fair, I really don't think anyone really expected the Big East to be as good as it actually became. I mean the members were mostly good programs, but I don't believe any had actually won NCAA titles. There were a couple of NIT titles among the group from back in the day when the NIT was considered equal, maybe even more than equal to the NCAA. Providence and St Johns both had NITs form the late 1950s or 60s. BC had been to an NIT final. Villanova had been to a Final Four (which was vacated). Syracuse had claimed a poll title back in the 1920s or 30s. UConn was probably a little big behind PC, BC, but not that much. the conference was good but it wasn't until Ewing at Georgetown, and the 1985 season where 3 of the Final Four teams were from the Big East and the 4th, BC, lost its Elite Eight game in OT that people really began seeing the Big East as the one we think of today. By that time UConn had already declined mostly. But in the early years, while not a power, the Huskies were a mid-pack program.

 

[upstater]

Actually nobody really did. In the early Big East years UConn was a middle of the road team. If the NCAA tourney had as many bids as it does now, UConn would likely have earned at least 1 or 2 more. Nobody really expected UConn to win National Championships but UConn wasn't terrible either. That came later. But to be fair, I really don't think anyone really expected the Big East to be as good as it actually became. I mean the members were mostly good programs, but I don't believe any had actually won NCAA titles. There were a couple of NIT titles among the group from back in the day when the NIT was considered equal, maybe even more than equal to the NCAA. Providence and St Johns both had NITs form the late 1950s or 60s. BC had been to an NIT final. Villanova had been to a Final Four (which was vacated). Syracuse had claimed a poll title back in the 1920s or 30s. UConn was probably a little big behind PC, BC, but not that much. the conference was good but it wasn't until Ewing at Georgetown, and the 1985 season where 3 of the Final Four teams were from the Big East and the 4th, BC, lost its Elite Eight game in OT that people really began seeing the Big East as the one we think of today. By that time UConn had already declined mostly. But in the early years, while not a power, the Huskies were a mid-pack program.

When the BE started, Perno pulled in some monster recruiting classes. Unfortunately, that never really brought UConn to prominence. Corny Thompson, Chuck Aleksinas (a transfer), Mike McKay--these were not bad players, and it was one of the better classes in the BE in the first couple of year.

 

[ffg53]

Actually nobody really did. In the early Big East years UConn was a middle of the road team. If the NCAA tourney had as many bids as it does now, UConn would likely have earned at least 1 or 2 more. Nobody really expected UConn to win National Championships but UConn wasn't terrible either. That came later. But to be fair, I really don't think anyone really expected the Big East to be as good as it actually became. I mean the members were mostly good programs, but I don't believe any had actually won NCAA titles. There were a couple of NIT titles among the group from back in the day when the NIT was considered equal, maybe even more than equal to the NCAA. Providence and St Johns both had NITs form the late 1950s or 60s. BC had been to an NIT final. Villanova had been to a Final Four (which was vacated). Syracuse had claimed a poll title back in the 1920s or 30s. UConn was probably a little big behind PC, BC, but not that much. the conference was good but it wasn't until Ewing at Georgetown, and the 1985 season where 3 of the Final Four teams were from the Big East and the 4th, BC, lost its Elite Eight game in OT that people really began seeing the Big East as the one we think of today. By that time UConn had already declined mostly. But in the early years, while not a power, the Huskies were a mid-pack program.

Really? I lived in western/central New York at the time. Plenty of people in central New York were saying exactly that about UConn in Orange country. There weren't any message boards then...for better or worse.